Ancient Gold Jewelry

At the Dallas Museum of Art

The Dallas Museum has been very busy fulfilling its mandate to educate the public, producing two books about its own collection of ancient art and publishing one about a traveling exhibit Dallas organized of the University of Pennsylvania's ancient Egyptian collection. The most extensive of the three books is the massive exhibition catalog, Searching for Ancient Egypt. A short history of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and its excavations puts everything into perspective. Seven essays by eminent scholars such as William Kelly Simpson and David O'Connor examine all aspects of Egyptian art, architecture, and crafts from the sacred to the mundane. If the illustrations are as excellent overall as the two samples sent with the galleys, they will add excellent detail to the text. The other two catalogs focus on elements of Dallas's own ancient art collection. Curator Bromberg and Kilinski (Jupiter's Loves & His Children, Univ. of Georgia, 1997) are well qualified to review ancient history and culture through its surviving artifacts in the Dallas Museum's modest collection. Independent scholar Deppert-Lippitz focuses solely on Dallas's lovely jewelry, beautifully illustrated here (how the gold does shine!). These holdings are a recent acquisition of outstanding quality that raises Dallas's collection in ancient art from small but elegant to one of importance in the study of the history of gold ornaments. While Bromberg and Kilinski's work is only for comprehensive ancient art collections, Deppert-Lippitz's catalog is excellent for any collection on the history of jewelry, and the Pennsylvania catalog should prove an outstanding addition to collections surveying ancient Egyptian art or the history of its excavation.?Mary Morgan Smith, Northland P.L., Pittsburgh